ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses animal matter and its repercussions on the scholar as a starting point for a discussion of materiality. It presents the cultural history museum and the natural history museum as places that contain animal matter and treasuries for scholars engaged in the cultural histories of animals. The chapter shows that how animal matter is embedded in culture and society, exemplified by evocative, talkative and 'knotted' animal things. It focuses on the ethical questions animal museum objects may provoke. In the zoological collections the remnants of the pet dog Bella had been neutralised and naturalised, to make her represent a type of Canis lupus familiaris. Bella's story is really about animal matter in transition in space and time. It exemplifies brilliantly the degree to which people understanding of a material object is deduced from where it is situated or located, in the case of Bella the natural history museum versus the folk museum.
